Blogger, realist, clarifier, if there is such a term. Truth teller, who's not afraid to admit I'm wrong. Hellacious, renegade violist and "computer whisperer"; was once accused of practicing the Dark Arts with systems.
I'm tougher than most and survived things that would have killed most women. I still love life. I was homeless, now I'm not. Still in the 'hood, though. Nebraska Avenue, 33605. The stories are priceless and endless.

Wednesday, July 16, 2014

Music of the Spheres.
. . well. I had to call it something. Music has always been a part of my life and is
something that I used as a conduit to another place. I hear that a
lot and I get that; stuff about how one is "transported,"
or "forgets their problems," and it's a lot of bullshit.
Maybe it is so for other people, but I'm not talking about that kind
of transportation. I'm a musician and was born one. Something that I
just knew, like a lot of stuff we just know, in an unconscious,
visceral way, although when I knew it, I was too young to articulate
all of that. It's an atavistic knowing, like an animal knows it must
migrate along with its fellow beings. It can either be a blessing or
a goddamned werewolf, or both, but it has to be answered and lived up
to, even when life has other ideas. Even when you're mentally ill,
like Bederich Smetana and so many other composers and players and
you're not always sure you have anything like a half-assed grasp on
reality, because you've seen and felt and done and experienced things
that you know are true, even if the rest of the world remains either
unconvinced, or worse yet, clueless, because it takes insight, guts,
heart and the willingness to step off of that cliff, knowing that a
convergence of faith and scientific knowledge will see you through,
to do what is absolutely the right thing. Both morally and
universally and I mean that both literally and figuratively. If you
stick with me and have some patience, as I de-construct my tale, I
promise you, it will be worth it.

The
philosopher, Frederic Nietzsche once said, or is said to have said,
or maybe thought it—I tend to get fuzzy on details, although the
larger picture is accurate—that "Life without music would be a
mistake". I absolutely believe that to be true, and not in an
"oops" kind of way, but in a cataclysmic
destroyer-of-worlds-Shiva kind of way. And it's not only because I
yearn, cry and laugh when I hear music, but I also mourn, feel pain,
rage, and dread. In short, the entire panoply of human emotions are
writ large, in music, and I along with a majority of the human race
get that. If you don't believe me, just listen to Beethoven's 3rd
Symphony.

It
is every emotion I just mentioned, plus a smattering of syncopation,
that sounds suspiciously jazzy. When other artists in other
disciplines are asked what they consider they highest form of art to
be, it is natural that musicians say "music is the highest form
of expression of the arts," but then, someone like Nic Cage
comes along and says the very same thing. This from a man who can do
and become literally anything on film. That is high praise for an
art, indeed. I recognize and understand what he is saying, because I
turn the analogy on it's head this way: Boxing is the highest form of
sport and sportsmanship, because of its artistry and brutality; it is
truly the Sweet Science.

In
no other sport is there the complexity of thought, physicality,
rhythm, discipline, harmony and timing. I have run into other
musicians at boxing matches and it's noteworthy that at first we're
surprised, embarrassed to be caught out, and then. . . not so much.
Because we all recognize the same thing in the fighters. So, I
understood Nic Cage when I first started watching his movies; my
fascination with him lay not in his acting, but in his performance as
an artist. I think at one time, we all shared that fascination with
creating music and the inherent instincts or feelings that have been
there from birth, not just as babies, but as a civilization, remain
and will never become vestigial.

Tchaikovsky
is one of the hardest of composers for me to listen to when I am in a
depressed state. Black unto black, I could not listen at all to his
6th symphony for almost a year after my father died. The last
movement of that piece, written not long before his death is
completely without hope. What a horrible, horrible emotion to
experience, and even more terrible for the fact that he was able to
articulate it so thoroughly through his composing, and understood his
own pain. It is monumental in it's suffering and truly beautiful, but
if you're having a bad day, month, year, or decade, it's best to
avoid his 6th Symphony; the beautiful third movement waltz in 5/4
time and all. Skip the whole thing and go zone out to that famous
bubble-gum composer's greatest hits: Mozart. Ick.

But, if it took Tchaikovsky to break my heart, it took Mahler to steal it away and then, lose it in a way I could never retrieve it. Not because of the dark magic and nature of his music,
but because he shows such a human side and such a hopeful one, in the
face of withering and horrible circumstances. He, being a Bohemian
composer, has the odd, folk-music way of playing what seems to be
happy-go-lucky tunes in a Major key, while underlying all, is a minor
underpinning. Mahler "got it" through his music, which is
so human and heartfelt as to be terrifying, but not in his life,
which is far different than Pyotr Tchaikovsky, and all the more
tragic for his not knowing, or understanding how black his life would
become.

Married
to the beautiful Alma, he forebore her infidelities, and was to have
said, just 2 weeks before his death, from myocarditis, at age 51,
"Ah, Alma, we will live forever!" In his 1st symphony, he
has a funeral march, that is of an animal, buried by animals, they
periodically break out into the hellishness of a gypsy-klezmer group
gone completely off the rails, before once again regaining their
composure and fall back into their dirge-like procession, as they
bear the corpse to it's final repose. The music seems to ask at the
end, "Can I not linger, just a while longer? I'm having such a
good time. . .” These are my impressions, my feelings; that's
another great thing about music. Although we're hard-wired to accept
basic fundamentals as fact, say, Major versus minor keys, music is
entirely subjective. Musicology bedamned; I am sure Musicologists
imparted some greater meaning to that passage, but I hear a simple
plea to hang around for a bit more of the fun.

I
got more out of Music History for time and place, than I did in Music
Theory for ear-training (I have perfect pitch, and thus, am lazy, so
I did a lot of coasting in music school) and why humans are drawn to
certain tones; we all “agree” on the basic language. Interesting
enough and if this be true, and I believe it to be so, what else is
drawn to these tones; these chords. Because I do not for one second
believe that we are the only sentient beings in the universe. You
see, the universe has a tone, a note, a key, if you will. A note that
we all contribute to. Some say it's E flat, some say F or F sharp. I
think it's all of those and more, because the universe is
ever-changing and is not an entropic thing. In a way it's like the
"you'll change history if you go back in time and step on a
butterfly," but not really, Because we change courses everyday,
just as we change our note. It is a sonic, universal symphony.

Victor
Hugo referred to it in his masterpiece “Hunchback of Notre Dame”,
in his description of Easter or Pentecost in Paris in the fifteenth
century:

“. . . beneath
the rising sun of Easter or of Pentecost--climb upon some elevated
point, whence you command the entire capital; and be present at the
wakening of the chimes. Behold, at a signal given from heaven, for it
is the sun which gives it, all those
churchesquiver
simultaneously. First come scattered strokes, running from one church
to another, as when musicians give warning that they are about to
begin. Then, all at once, behold!--for it seems at times, as though
the ear also possessed a sight of its own,--behold, rising from each
bell tower, something like a column of sound, a cloud of harmony.
First, the vibration of each bell mounts straight upwards, pure and,
so to speak,
isolated from the others, into the splendid morning sky; then, little
by little, as they swell they melt together, mingle, are lost in each
other, and amalgamate in a magnificent concert. It is no longer
anything but a mass of sonorous vibrations incessantly sent forth
from the numerous belfries; floats, undulates, bounds, whirls over
the city, and prolongs far beyond the horizon the deafening circle of
its oscillations.

Nevertheless,
this sea of harmony is not a chaos; great and profound as it is, it
has not lost its transparency; you behold the windings of each group
of notes which escapes from the belfries. You can follow the
dialogue, by turns grave and shrill, of the treble and the bass; you
can see the octaves leap from one tower to another; you watch them
spring forth, winged, light, and whistling, from the silver bell, to
fall, broken and limping from the bell of wood; you admire in their
midst the rich gamut which incessantly ascends and re-ascends the
seven bells of Saint-Eustache; you see light and rapid notes running
across it, executing three or four luminous zigzags, and vanishing
like flashes of lightning. Yonder is the Abbey of Saint-Martin, a
shrill, cracked singer;
here the gruff and gloomy voice of the Bastille; at the other end,
the great tower of the Louvre, with its bass. The royal chime of the
palace scatters on all sides, and without relaxation, resplendent
trills, upon which fall, at regular intervals, the heavy strokes from
the belfry of Notre-Dame, which makes them sparkle like the anvil
under the hammer. At intervals you behold the passage of sounds of
all forms which come from the triple peal of Saint-Germaine des Prés.
Then, again, from time to time, this mass of sublime noises opens and
gives passage to the beats of the Ave Maria, which bursts forth and
sparkles like an aigrette of stars. Below, in the very depths of the
concert, you confusedly distinguish the interior chanting of the
churches,
which exhales through the vibratingporesof
their vaulted roofs.”

I
sure as HELL am no Victor Hugo, but then, I'm no Jascha Heifetz and I
got along just swell on the viola; maybe I can pull off the same
trick in telling my story. I used to scuba-dive off the coast of
California in Monterey. Too young and stupid to know better, I and a
cohort dove off the pier and went towards the edge of the Continental
Shelf. The Continental Shelf is defined as "a submerged border
of a continent that slopes gradually and extends to a point of
steeper descent to the ocean bottom". The gradual sloping part
varies, however, and we knew the particular spot where the drop was
precipitous and sharp. The Pacific Ocean is cold and we were both
wearing full wet suits.

After
clawing our way through the kelp beds and swimming off shore for a
while, the water rapidly deepened, as the drop-off of the shelf came
up swiftly. The water there is inky black, and seems almost viscous.
We slowed as we approached and held our breaths. As I recall, we were
down about 60 or 70 feet; this would not be a decompression dive.
When we stuck our heads out over the shelf and took a peek, the
water, no, the space, was so much blacker; stygian, more viscous-like; almost gelatinous,
inky and beyond cold. So very cold, that the contrast between the
warmth of my wet suit and the upwelling water was instantly felt, but
the thing I remember most as we hung our heads out over this. . .
thing that seemed almost alive, and, that we later found out was the
sea bed, that went from 60 or 70 feet to over 2000 feet or more, was
the sound it made.

The
Continental Shelf makes a sound, much like the sound you hear when
you put your ear up to a garden hose and listen, when the water isn't
running. It's a hollow, spooky sound. It thrums and changes and seems
to echo and it's all around you. You can feel it in your bones, your
ears; your heart. It is deep; probably too deep a note for the human
ear to discern, were one on land, but here, you are submerged in it.
Not in the heart of it, but more near the top. I remember thinking
that to be at the heart of this great sound would be eerie indeed,
and I might not survive such an encounter. It was terrible and
gorgeous in its significance and weight. It too, has its own note and
changes in pitch and frequency, I am sure, with the changing of the
tides, seasons and pollution and man-made structures that come and go
over the centuries. Now, apply that to the universe. That, my
friends, is the "Music of the Spheres".

This is the first draft of the prologue to my novel I wrote for #NaNoWriMo in 2013. Any constructive criticism would be much appreciated, since I have never done anything like this before. Thank you from the bottom of my heart!

Itinerant violist and computer trouble-shooter for more years than I care to admit. While no longer homeless, still crazy, but with Labels *sigh* a bus-riding Asperger, bipolar-ridden, PD or non-PD, carbon life-form, providing fodder for Medical community. Not even kidding. Still ridiculous.

Acquiring a much richer and fuller experience and finding deeper meaning in day to day life, than I ever learned in a classroom, concert hall, or computer center. I will never believe that things just occur randomly, just monumentally disordered.

Sunday, July 13, 2014

I love doing these cover reveals and interviews for my favorite authors and all-around wonderful friends that I've met in the two-plus years that I have been blogging. As a rule, you all are a generous bunch and fun to be around and last April, when we were doing the A-to-Z Challenge, I had the great good fortune to run into several new and zany friends! As is my wont, I offered my website as a place for you and this is a standing rule, to do cover reveals, host interviews with your characters, allow me to ask you questions; in short, anything that will help you sell an extra book or three. I enjoy doing this and I always find new things to read. So! With that in mind, today, we're hosting the COVER REVEAL of Crystal Collier's new book, "Soulless". This looks like a marvelous book and Crystal is a marvelous lady, who loves cheese. We bonded immediately when I found this out during an A-to-Z chat. Anyway, with no further verbiage, here is Ms. Collier's COVER REVEAL!

Have you met the Soulless and Passionate? In the world of 1770 where supernatural beings mix with humanity, Alexia is playing a deadly game.

SOULLESS, Book 2 in the Maiden of Time trilogy

Alexia manipulated time to save the man of her dreams, and
lost her best friend to red-eyed wraiths. Still grieving, she struggles to
reconcile her loss with what was gained: her impending marriage. But when her
wedding is destroyed by the Soulless—who then steal the only protection her
people have—she's forced to unleash her true power.

And risk losing everything.

What people are saying about this series:

"With a completely unique plot that keeps you guessing and interested, it brings you close to the characters, sympathizing with them and understanding their trials and tribulations." --SC, Amazon reviewer

Crystal Collier is a young adult author who pens dark fantasy, historical, and romance hybrids. She can be found practicing her brother-induced ninja skills while teaching children or madly typing about fantastic and impossible creatures. She has lived from coast to coast and now calls Florida home with her creative husband, three littles, and â€œfriendâ€ (a.k.a. the zombie locked in her closet). Secretly, she dreams of world domination and a bottomless supply of cheese. You can find her on her blog and Facebook, or follow her on Twitter.

Itinerant violist and computer trouble-shooter for more years than I care to admit. While no longer homeless, still crazy, but with Labels *sigh* a bus-riding Asperger, bipolar-ridden, PD or non-PD, carbon life-form, providing fodder for Medical community. Not even kidding. Still ridiculous.

Acquiring a much richer and fuller experience and finding deeper meaning in day to day life, than I ever learned in a classroom, concert hall, or computer center. I will never believe that things just occur randomly, just monumentally disordered.

I've
gone back and finished “Under the Dome” by Stephen King, and I
cannot say that it was my favorite King book ever, or even up there
in the 50 percentile. I don't really know why this is, but as time
has passed and books like “The Stand”, “Salem's Lot”, “Dead
Zone” and even “The Shining” come up on their 30th
plus years' anniversaries, they look more like books written by
someone who was truly serious about literature in general and in
horror specifically. One of his finest books, “Different Seasons”
produced three exemplary novellas; an extremely difficult form to
master, and they were rich in language and satisfying, even in their
brevity. “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption”, “Apt
Pupil”, and “The Body” each left behind the supernatural and
horror genres King was famous for at the time and they were
resoundingly wonderful to read.

There is a television show of the same name. I got through about 14 minutes of it and had to turn off the tee vee. I understand it's been renewed.

But,
it seemed to me, that after the publishing of “It”, King had hit
a wall, or gotten into a rut. I'm not saying his writing became
formulaic, although, after so many books, some of the characters do
take on a sameness. What bothers me specifically is that his writing
voice has become artificial. It becomes harder and harder, with
exceptions to buy into whatever his characters' scrapes, situations,
life-and-death perils and choices are about and I find myself
dwelling more and more on the voice that is telling the tale, and to
me it is not ringing true.

Maybe
all wildly successful authors go through this; they hit their stride
and they find just the right note with an audience, and
subconsciously, they begin writing TO that audience, rather than just
spinning out their tales. One of my favorite authors, Aldrea Alien,
says in her bio “Since discovering the love of writing at the age
of twelve, she hasn't found an ounce of peace from the characters
plaguing her mind.” I love that; she puts her stories out there and
they are hum-dingers. She's writing currently about a race of
lizard-people and there are all sorts of things afoot. Being totally
rational, and given to reading history books, I was a bit skeptical
at first, but she makes it so damned REAL, that her world is easy to
buy into. Her worlds are spectacular and her plots are action-filled.
Lizard-people, huh. Who'da thunk it? Her characters are fully-fleshed
and their actions spring organically, from their previous experiences
and lives.

"The Rogue King" Available on Amazon.com. Again, as one who reads crime fiction, or history books, I became instantly captivated with Aldrea's Koral and his struggles and the world he lives in.

Back
to the “Dome”, and King's writing; a quick synopsis can be found
here. Some of King's characters make this kind of organic
sense, most notably, Dale Barbara, the protagonist of the book. As a
veteran of Dubya's mis-informed incursion into Iraq, Barbara is
familiar with the techniques of torture and humiliation that were de
rigueur as a part of an occupying unit in the Army, but that was
not who he was, and ultimately, his decency and humanity win out.
After a brief stint in Chester Mill's jail, which sees his life
threatened by Junior Rennie, who conveniently has a brain tumor,
which is causing him to be not just evil like his father, but
overtly batshit, Barbara is freed, to lead the good faction, that
eventually wins out.

"Big" Jim Rennie, as portrayed by the awesome Dean Norris, late of "Breaking Bad". This man can do good and evil equally well, and it's too bad King didn't have him for a template in the book. As it is, he is infinitely creepier in the show (so I've heard and can believe) than what King originally wrote.

The
problem for me is the antagonist, Big Jim Rennie, used car salesman
and 2nd town Selectman, who is just pure evil, through and
through and of such a cartoonish quality, I find it hard to buy into
ANYTHING he is selling, whether it be a car, or his own home-spun
philosophy, regarding who should run the town after the Dome has
fallen. No reason is given, as to his badness; did he wet the bed as
a kid? Were his parents dysfunctional? Who the hell knows and I
really was well-nigh fed up with him and his stupid dialogue.

Dale Barbara is played by actor Mike Vogel in the series; he seems to have made little impression on me, as I registered him as a cipher. He also seems to be a bit younger than your average Iraqi war vet, but hey, that's tee vee!

This
is another thing about King that drives me batshit. In “The Stand”,
people, including Randall Flagg, acted and talked like normal people;
you could buy into Flagg's brand of Evil, because it was so subtle;
so seductive. But with Big Jim, I find it hard to believe that he
could hoodwink an entire town and run a successful methamphetamine
lab out of the Christers' radio station WCIK and people NOT know
about it; the guy is as subtle as a lead balloon. The kind of lead
balloon that has a gondola and people would ride in, not a kid's
balloon; he's that obvious and non-creepy. Everyone's a "cotton-picker" and/or a "Son of a Buck" which wears thin, and that falsity of his language piles onto the falseness of his character. If we're meant to believe that he is a Town Selectman (one out of three, who all seem reasonably sane, although one of them has a drug addiction, which she manages to kick, 40 seconds before her gruesome death at a town gathering; very King-esque) then, we must assume the rest of the town doesn't give two hoots and a holler, or they're all on meth, which turns out not to be the case.

Julia Shumway, played by Rachelle Lefevre, on the show "Under the Dome". In the book, Julia is the town's sole editor of the newspaper and is several years older than Dale Barbara, but that doesn't usually play well in tee vee land. In the book, Julia goes to the Space Kids and makes a lone plea for mercy to be let free. It works, but the ending feels tacked on, rushed and there's no sense of resolution.

The
ending didn't work for me either; it was more Star Trek (to
quote Wikipedia) in the “Can't we all just get along” school of
reasoning by Julia Shumway, than anything else. The idea that Space
Kids were looking at these people under a Dome from a jillion miles
and observing their goings-on, much in the way kids have looked at
ant farms is not a new one, nor is the idea of sequestering a bunch
of individuals – people, pigs, cows, whatever – as in “Lord of
the Flies” to see what they do in the absence of authority. But
most certainly, Julia's little heart-felt plea at the very end of the
book, resulting in the presto! change-o! lifting of the Dome, to
sweet, sweet fresh air and then, bam! The End. Well, it just all
seemed rather hastily written to me, and didn't resonate as a
satisfying ending.

In
reading over some other critiques before writing this, I do admire
King's antipathy for the Bush-Cheney administration and understand
why he chose Dale Barbara as a vet of the War in Iraq, as his protagonist, and why he touches so often on the idea of wanton and casual torture; not as a means to an end, or because people are callous and cruel necessarily. It can be as simple as something to ease boredom, which is a hugely frightening thought.

This is an un-retouched, un-Photo-Shopped picture. You can just see the evil dripping off this man. I have a short, short list of people I would dearly love to see underground; he's on it. I make no excuse for my lack of acceptance, tolerance, or forgiveness for those particular individuals, nor do I think that how I feel is a bad thing; at least I'm honest.

The metaphor and/or idea of
raging little kids not being able to do anything but lash out at an unseen enemy when it
was demonstrably clear that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 would
seem preposterous, were it not for the fact that the Bush
Administration proceeded to go ahead and do just that: invade Iraq,
after the invasion of Afghanistan, and months of gleeful trumpeting
about hidden WMDs in Iraq, which never existed, nor could they.
Anyone paying two minutes of attention to current affairs in the 80s,
90s and 00s would know this; Iraq had not the infrastructure, nor the
will after having their asses kicked in the Iran-Iraq conflict that
was only ended, when a brokered peace eight years into the war,
brought about a re-establishment of the pre-war borders. Iraq then
went on to fail miserably in the invasion of Kuwait and subsequent
ass-kicking from the U.S., so they were not really inclined to start
up a new conflict. We saw a weakened country; a corrupt and teetering
tyranny and took full advantage of it. But, I digress.

I
was agreeing with King's assessment of the Bush-Cheney
administration, although, King saw Cheney as Jim Rennie and Bush as
Andy Sanders, the do-nothing selectman, who discovers the joys of becoming a tweaker. That part may be true; I've always had my suspicions about
Bush. But, Cheney? Rennie is no where near as evil as that man.
Enough said. Also let me add this; parts of the book were written a
long time ago, and parts are new. Much of it is allegorical and I
have to be honest. I have seldom read an allegorical book that
worked, with the sole exception being C. S. Lewis and his “Chronicles
of Narnia”. It's just always so painfully obvious to me, what the
writer is trying to convey and it usually falls flat.

Anyway,
I had to force myself to finish the book, which is something unusual
for me. I would love to read King's “November 22, 1963”, and see
if that doesn't have a more adult tone about it. I didn't post
earlier this week, as I just started a Clinical Trial, was gone all
day, and stupidly didn't have a post ready for Wednesday. I will be
hosting a cover reveal for a friend tomorrow, and can't wait! Anyway,
happy rowing, fellow ROWers and more to come!

Itinerant violist and computer trouble-shooter for more years than I care to admit. While no longer homeless, still crazy, but with Labels *sigh* a bus-riding Asperger, bipolar-ridden, PD or non-PD, carbon life-form, providing fodder for Medical community. Not even kidding. Still ridiculous.

Acquiring a much richer and fuller experience and finding deeper meaning in day to day life, than I ever learned in a classroom, concert hall, or computer center. I will never believe that things just occur randomly, just monumentally disordered.

Tuesday, July 8, 2014

I
always look forward to seeing my neurologist. She's a wonderful
doctor; a kind, caring and compassionate soul and is a mean wit,
although I'm not really sure if she's aware of that fact. Since I was
diagnosed with e. t. a year ago, visits to her have been more along
the lines of a coffee klatsch, minus the coffee, and some witty and
very astute observations from her regarding life. Today we critiqued
Samuel Beckett plays, and “new music,” some of the forms of Art
that I liken to “The Emperor's New Clothes” School of Whatever.
This can also apply to Public Art, the sort that is put up in public
squares and in open spaces, to guarantee maximum viewage and eye
damage to as many viewers as possible.

Can you imagine sitting in the office with this giant blue bear? What in the hell were these people thinking. . . or smoking. . . or shooting up, when they came up with this doozy? Oh, and I just noticed the upside-down red and white church. WTF? Same goes for the melted blue car in the upper left.

A giant, metal, paper airplane. People get paid wheelbarrows of dough to come up with this insipid dreck.

Eyesores
abounded in Ann Arbor, Michigan; there was one with a group of
mannequins climbing a very tall steel ladder and crammed up along the
top, as if they had all run into an invisible ceiling. Ant-like, the
ones below were just a-climbin' up into the ones stuck at the top,
creating a sort of wedge-shaped grouping of arms, legs and bald heads. The title referred to something nihilistic or inane, like “The
Futility of the Worker's Plight”. To me, it just looked like a
bunch of dummies on a ladder. Somebody paid good money for that and
someone else laughed all the way to the bank. On the next block over
was the giant metal cube, that was affixed to the pavement on one of it's corners. It would spin easily if you pushed it. I never did so, because I was
afraid the monstrous thing would break off it's pinnings and crush me
and 17 onlookers. Public Art can be dangerous!

Somehow,
during the appointment, during the
can-you-touch-my-finger-then-touch-your-nose-really-really-fast test,
in which I always, always spazz out and touch my leg, or her ear, or
some shit, the subject of Samuel Beckett came up. I had lived through
“Waiting for Godot”, coming out on the other end of that play
with a general what-the-fuck-was-that? sort of feeling, but at age
eighteen, I was pretty much in a sea of what-the-fuck. I still am,
but it's more a sort of confuse-a-what, brought on by my brain's own
general demand for everything being made crystal-clear IMMEDIATELY
and when, as so often happens in the course of life, that demand goes
unrequited, my brain supplies its own answer and it's usually no
where near anything close to reality on this planet. Maybe Neptune,
from which I believe I'm commuting to and from daily, but not of
Earth. This just only enriches my life in untold many and manifest
ways and I've come to grips with it. But, I digress.

These ladies don't look like the bag-lady, hobos that I saw when I saw this at Stanford, but better clothing doesn't make it any more comprehensible. Maybe I'm just dim-mish.

I
started telling my doctor about this OTHER Samuel Beckett play, or
vignette, “Come and Go” I sat through at Stanford University
once, and it consisted of three hobo-ish looking sorts who sat on a
plain, wooden bench and said virtually nothing for about 3 or 4 hours, or
so it seemed. These three bag ladies, named Flo, Vi and Ru were
holding hands in an interlocking style – I didn't know this at the
time, I just saw the thing cold – and spout what seem to be
meaningless inanities for a total of 2 minutes and 30 seconds. Lots
of pregnant pauses, and pretending to be statuary. Finally, Vi, or
Ru, or Flo, I cannot remember which says “I can feel the rings”.
Finis. Play over. I had to go back and read the script and see if
this still felt as out-of-touch for me as it did, when I saw it in my
'teens. Yep; no clearer. Beckett was odd. So, I'm telling my doctor
all of this and about the hobo women, or vagabonds, or whatever, and
she blurts out, while she was scribbling out some notes, “Hmmmm,
sounds like “Waiting for Godot” meets Arlo Guthrie”.” I don't
think she knows how funny she is sometimes, but I sure agree with her
assessment.

The
'60s and 1968, in particular were a time that saw the United States
of America turned on it's head and for the first time, we began to
question those we had put in power. After LBJ and his Great Society,
which gave us a safety net on top of what Franklin Delano Roosevelt
had started during his Presidency, it began to look like there might
be some true equality and hope for people in the lower income strata,
who had had none. But, 1968 changed that, quite a bit. We discovered
we had been lied to about the true state of the war in Viet Nam.

Robert
MacNamara, General Westmoreland (deputy commander of Military
Assistance Command, VietNam, or MACV) had been providing LBJ and the
oversight committees in Congress and the Senate with falsified
reports on the number of casualties of both the North Vietnamese and
our own troops. We had been told that we were winning this war, and
it was only a matter of time before we penetrated the North, took
Hanoi, and unseated Ho Chi Minh, the titular President of North Viet
Nam.

In
March of 1968, during the Vietnamese New Year, that myth was busted
wide open. A carefully laid plan, up and down the length of Viet Nam
saw the uprising of North Vietnamese, especially in the South and in
Saigon; the Tet Offensive. We took heavy, heavy casualties and for
the first time, we really started to look at what we were doing in a
country that as Muhammad Ali would say, we “ain't got no quarrel
with them boys”. While this was not the undoing of the Johnson
Administration, it was responsible for his decision to not run for a
second full term, thus we elected Richard M. Nixon, who turned out to
be no better, and in many ways worse for Southeast Asia; he
claimed he wanted no wider war, but then expanded it to bombing parts
of Cambodia and Laos, thus further destabilizing the region, and
paving the way for Pol Pot, one of the 20th Century's true
monsters and a crackerjack mass-murderer, when it came to genocide.
Within a decade two-fifths of the 5 million people in Cambodia had died in
re-education camps or been summarily executed and buried in mass
graves.

Two-fifths of a nation of five million, or rather two million people died under the rule of Pol Pot. While we were not directly responsible for his rise to power, we had a huge part in destabilizing Cambodia, which had declared itself neutral, under the regime of Prince Norodom Sihanouk. America widened the bombing to include the mountains and the Mekong Delta, claiming that North Vietnamese were infiltrating the region. The truth? The Montagnards in the area were fiercely anti-communist and separatist, to boot.

So,
where am I going with all of this? Back in the early 60s, we helped
to prop up a corrupt leader in Saigon, because there was no one
suitable, and rather than see the entire country become communist, we
would have crawled in bed with Satan himself, in order to keep this
from happening. In a similar fashion, we aided the Taliban in the
early 80s, because they were fighting the Russians in Afghanistan.
When the Vietnamese President Ngo Dien Dimh rigged a vote in the
South, and won by an astonishing 98.2 percent, including 133 percent
in Saigon, the country became “unified” in 1955. Although we did
not have troops in the field then, we had “advisors”, most likely
CIA operatives, due to the number of assassinations of key North
Vietnamese politicians and players who were eliminated. The
“advisors” were there to try and assist in establishing a
democracy in Viet Nam, which Dimh had no intention of ever doing.

As
these things go, it began to escalate; we were backing the wrong
horse, and Ho Chi Minh, a true patriot, not just a communist, wanted
Viet Nam for, well. . . the Vietnamese. We should have been backing
no horse. Not too much to ask for. We all know the terrible ending of
this conflagration. Millions of innocent Vietnamese died. We got our
asses kicked, and for the FIRST time, we began to question what in
the Hell we were doing in this little back water country, that the
French (Dien Bien Phu, 1955) couldn't hang onto in the first place.

Now,
we've come to this: Afghanistan is once more looking like some kind
of quagmire. Despite the quote “Graveyard of Empires” a quick
gander through Afghanistan's history, shows that conquering armies do
have some success. The problem is as Alexander the Great has put it
“It's easy to march into, tough to march out of”. So, we've split
our forces there. We're in the 13th year of a
who-knows-how-many-years run, despite assurances from the Obama
administration, that we will leave some day.

My
main bitch, whine, whinge, whatever you want to call it is that now
we have a fairly well-organized islamic group called ISIS, which uses
very sophisticated tactics in re-claiming territory in Iraq. Take
Tirkut, recently. Not one shot fired; the whole operation was one of
propaganda, much like Joseph Goebbels in Nazi Germany, but that kind
of entrenchment goes a long way towards promoting goodwill among the
citizens in comparison with the U. S. invasion. Again, we have backed
the wrong horse; some guy, who looks more like a used-car salesman,
than someone who would be leader of a great country in the Middle
East.

Admittedly, I detest Dubya and think he's a tool of Dick Cheney's and stupid, to boot. I highly doubt that they would have approved of anyone who would think independently, or for the common good of his country. It may be fallacious thinking, but Talabani, just by his association with the Bush administration, can not possibly have his country's best interests at heart.

Elections,
schmelections; we helped to groom and primp this guy, this Jalal Talabani,
fluff him, pat him dry and make him look good, but underneath is the
same old corruption and bad politics. Iraq's constitutional government
is loosely based on our own, and he is limited to two 4-year terms.
But, how great is it when you have still have corruption at every level from the
police on up to the highest offices in the Military? By the end of
the U. S.'s stay in South Viet Nam, we had propped up a
revolving-door bunch of characters; a total of 13 guys in all. I
think some of them had a second go at screwing up the country even
more than it was already screwed up. All with our help, of course.

I started typing out all these names and then remembered the ole' cut-and-snip thingy. You can imagine what kind of hell it mush have been like in Saigon, during the last 10 years. I think a few of these guys ended up running 7-11s in east Los Angeles.

And
we're doing it again; we're sending U. S. “advisors”,
along with 250 military boots on the ground are in Iraq, or are
headed back there to Baghdad. That means that we will be in a
position to. . . do what? Just what are we trying to accomplish
there, because I hear nothing coherent coming out of our State
Department or from President Obama. It's time to cut the apron
strings, the umbilical cord, let that bitch sail and if she sails
over a cliff, so be it.

I
never said a word about Ukraine and Russia because I understand both
cultures and people involved. Yeah, it's sad that Ukraine is being
bullied by Russia, but the fact is there are ethnic Russians who live
in Ukraine near the Russian border and in the Crimea, who probably do
feel threatened by the ethnic Ukrainians; that's what happens when
you go from being the conqueror, to being just the guy living next
door. It's human nature. It's also within Russia's weltenschauung and
very typically Russian, that the ground the ethnic Ukrainians are
living on once belonged to them. They have typically been part of the
Russian empire and within her sphere of influence since the
Austro-Hungarian Empire and after World War II, Stalin demanded the
states of Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus, Ukraine,
Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Georgia, Azerbaijan,
Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Tadjikistan as a buffer between Western
Europe and Russia. I could be wrong about Azerbaijan and the -stans,
but am too lazy to look it up.

Russians
are extremely territorial in a way we cannot even begin to
comprehend. I counted once, and between the Russo-Japanese War of
1905 and World War II, when the Nazis invaded on June 22, 1941,
Russia was invaded FIVE times, by enemy forces. The United States has
NEVER been invaded; It's not hard to figure out the dynamics there,
nor their reasons for behaving the way they do on both sides. I'd
give my eye-teeth to be there now, but I can watch from a distance
and it's going about the way I thought it would.

If
you notice carefully, there's a lot of back-pedaling and well, “maybe
we want this, maybe we aren't sure”. This is oh, so typical in
Eastern European politics. A lot of smoke and mirrors and hollering
about having what they don't have, but once whatever it is they want
is on the horizon, or knocking on the door, well, it doesn't look so
good up close. Thus, the confusion over whom is doing what and who is
for Russia and by extension, Putin and who isn't. Their Politburo (I
refuse to call it a Duma or a Parliament, because it's not) took back
their vote of confidence on what he's doing in Ukraine, on the eve of
the rebels' victory. What does it all mean?

Who
knows; somewhere I have a feeling a bunch of folks are digging out
their hammer-and-sickle flags and Lenin bobble-head statues and wishing for
the good old days. It never fails. But whatever it all means, or
doesn't mean, I do believe this: we need to stay home and stop trying
to be the world's policemen. We're terrible at it, and we're not
exporting Truth, Justice, and the American Way. We're sowing greed, corrupting, and hatred, and as a people, we're not like that. We're a bunch of
blind bullies, ignorant of the ways and mores of the people we think
we are helping, or pretending to help. We don't need the oil. We
don't need the hegemony; technology has put that “bullets and
bayonets” mentality back in the closet. We need to start acting
like members of the human race, not some self-proclaimed Overlords.

Itinerant violist and computer trouble-shooter for more years than I care to admit. While no longer homeless, still crazy, but with Labels *sigh* a bus-riding Asperger, bipolar-ridden, PD or non-PD, carbon life-form, providing fodder for Medical community. Not even kidding. Still ridiculous.

Acquiring a much richer and fuller experience and finding deeper meaning in day to day life, than I ever learned in a classroom, concert hall, or computer center. I will never believe that things just occur randomly, just monumentally disordered.

Sunday, July 6, 2014

I
was working on a really nasty trojan infestation at the time of my
last post. What I thought was going to be a quick fix, turned out to
be a giant hairy mess, with cooties. On an HP laptop, dual core,
Windows 7 Premium, that my neighbor had bought for 200.00. Her niece
had borrowed it and done some OOvOO and Skype and the usual kid
stuff, WITHOUT benefit of the new Microsoft Security Essentials
package (which right off the bat, has me asking a million damn
questions, such as, doesn't MS already HAVE its own Defender
and Firewall for Windows? If so, then why do they need this add-on? They do, don't they, but they don't work
worth a SHIT, so MS came up with an app that is like malwarebytes or
AVG, or Norton, or MacAfee). A note here, I know I'm in for a laff
riot, when a user hands me a laptop with all of that installed and
running, or trying to run. Pick two and stick with them, preferably
malwarebytes (the free version is just fine) and AVG – BUY the
licensed version. MacAfee and Norton are terrible and Norton is so
horrible, I used to call it back in the day when it was “Disc
Doctor”, “Kevorkian Disk Doctor” it's that horrid. It was known
to cause instant suicide if even placed in the proximity of hard drives. MacAfee
uses a weak algorithm; stay away from it.

Now
that I'm through ripping on all the hideousnesss for a minute, let me
tell you what you need to know if you come up with this little gem:
f5f5dc.com. Find the nearest cliff and jump off. Just kidding. If you
run a pingback on that bastard, it's going to take you to a
404 error screen, along with your quickly evaporating store of patience, so GOOGLE this bastard: "f5f5dc.com" for
this:

Bad
juju. Anything east of the Iron Curtain is pretty much bad juju.
Don't get me wrong. I do a lot of work with the Russians on SAT@home
and they are my second largest readership, but for some reason, the
majority of trojans and malware come from east of the ole' Iron
Curtain. Anyway, this nasty little booger snuck in with our old
friend JAVA, on my friend's laptop and is called an “exploit”
because JAVA is designed to be “exploitable”. You can read that
article here. JAVA is evil and should be killed, buried and drawn-and-quartered ASAP.

This guy helpfully supplied an ENTIRE copy of his what his O/S was trying to do and I isolated the 27 instances of the call commands to HOST or devices/servers outside of his laptop. I had more than 50 such instances on the laptop I was working on and by that time, very little space for any operations by the PC itself. Maddening.

All
that aside, trying to run Restore after running malwarebytes on my
friend's laptop didn't fix the problem, because the site, or non-site
f5f5dc.com is set up to download a little number called tesch.b9 (a
true reiterative trojan-high level threat), which causes that laptop
to “call” or to try and open numerous browsers via ports, only it
truncates that operation and never goes any farther than launching
the svchost.dll32 file. Not once, not twice, but as many iterations
as the computer will allow until the system is so bogged down, you
cannot do anything. At. All. Needless to say, this threw me; I'd
never seen it, and when I looked in Task Manager under “Processes”
I saw 50 of these svchost.dll32 files and had not yet opened a
browser although I was connected to the internet.

I
rebooted into Safe Mode without the Internet and saw the various
programs, which I removed via Control Program; Adobe Reader, Java,
SpyWareBlaster(?), OovOO, but left Skype. I restarted and tried to
start a normal session and got the same nonsense. Shit. I was left
with nothing but the System Repair, as if the computer had
just left the factory to fix it. I found this information from a
website called “Tech Support Guy”, found here.

For
John Holton, and a few others out there who asked, if you run the
malware bytes and the system is behaving properly, but calling for
new browser sessions, the best instructions in the world are to be
found here and make tons of sense. For everyone else, if
you're on a PC, and even if you have itunes, or whatever, you need to
seriously reconsider whether you want to keep running JAVA. I haven't
run JAVA since 2011, and I have 4 systems, and have not had to reload
anything. But, it really sucks if you lose all of your data files,
especially your pictures and your videos. Do yourself a huge favor
and check out Dropbox and Synch; they're free for the first 5 gigs
and you can safely store your LOLcats, recipes for onion dip and pictures of little Johnny
dropping Gampy's dentures in the toilet.

I'm
still batting .1000 for fixes, but the trojans get nastier and meaner
and I can only do so much after the fact. Someone needs to bring me a
nice relational database problem, or something; this living on the
edge has got to stop!

Speaking
of living on the edge, Alex and I rode the bus recently; actually we
ride it all the time, but every so often, you get lucky and
something, or somebody note-worthy happens along. It was a Friday
morning and already in the 90s and muggy. We were sitting in the bus
shelter, on Nebraska Ave., 33605, waiting to ride uptown to some of the stores, when this
gentleman appeared, and I use that term the way in which it was
intended. This was a gentle soul. He had on sandals, nondescript
pants and shirt and a cane. His long, flowing hair was blond and his
eyes were blue. He had a long, long, well-kept beard; it was a
patriarchal beard. His gaze appeared fixed on some other world. Alex
was sitting across from me, and this gentlemen stood between us and a
bit to the rear of the bus shelter, so that I could see Alex's eyes.
He caught mine, and quickly looked at our gentle soul and said
“Hallelujah!” just about the time I noticed that our gentleman
was carrying, besides his cane, some kind of wooden stake with a
point on the end.

Buddy Jesus wasn't riding the bus that day. I can just hear my Ma; "You are SO going to Hell, Mary Louise!" and I can hear my Daddy laughing; I was the one who told the Episcopal Priest, who had been invited to Sunday Dinner in a fit of ecumenicism by my mother, "Hmmm, Catholic Lite, All the Ritual, Only Half the Guilt." That's not even my line, but I'd heard it somewhere; my mother spent that lunch with a hideous fixed grin on her face, but it didn't stop her from inviting starving protestant Pastors, Rabbis and various leaders of other faiths over for Sunday dinner. We probably had a snake-charmer or a Warlock, in the crowd somewhere.

I
turned my head away from our gentle soul and hissed “I am so going
to beat the shit out of you, Alex!” and spent the next seven
minutes until the bus arrived trying not to look at anyone or
anything. When the bus finally DID arrive, forty-three eternities
later, Alex and I kindly let the gentle soul get on first. I burst
out, “What is wrong with you? You were making fun of “Jesus, the
Vampire Killer! I can't take you anywhere!” The last part of this
was drowned out by the 'hood, which decided to drive by and share its
music with us, at that precise moment. Yo! BOOM BOOM! Cracklezzz! Yo!
BOOM BOOM! Cracklezzz! Yo! BOOM BOOM! Cracklezzz! Yo! BOOM BOOM!
Cracklezzz! (The cracklezzz being the part of the sub-woofers that
ripped itself in two and died a few years ago, I guess, back when our
'banger was livin' large.) All of this happenin' sound is crammed
into a crappy little Toyota Corolla, the car of choice for 'bangers
on the go, complete with doors and hood in different colors than the
body. The rear sags on one end and the car is belching some ferocious
smoke. The driver is either so short, all you can see is the top of
his head, or the springs all broke in his driver's seat, OR, he's got
the bitch leaned back in a nearly-prone position; he is the
personification of phat. The traveling rap show leaves us, just as we
get on the bus. Well, my day has just been made.

Everything
else around here has been the ole' same-o same-o, minus the knife
fights. We still have to pick Señor Cerveza up out of the street now
and then, but he's a fixture; at least we know where he is. There's a
new restaurant opening up, just to the west of us. At least I assume
it's a restaurant; they're moving in tables for four and chairs to
match. I can't tell from the décor what the cuisine will be; just so
long as they're not serving cat. Just kidding.

Mama, doing the second-best thing that cats do. The first thing is eating.

This
is enough of a “debut” for me on what is the eve of #ROW80 3RD
QTR 2014. I am committing myself to posting EVERY DAY as I once did
when I started #ROW80. I do love to write and getting back into the
harness, I know, will make me a better writer and I hope, better
equipped to dealing with editing “Music of the Spheres”. I've
been trying this whole editing thing, and as one who has always
slapped words down onto a page and STET, I don't have this whole
patience thing down, nor do I have much of a filter; too much
second-guessing.

I
took a bit of time off from any social media, which I hope has not
hurt me too much. It can be overwhelming, and dealing with home stuff
has taken priority; JC's heart attack was a huge wake-up call for him
and everything was thrown off-kilter. His health has been much better
of late, but I am also a “lone-wolf” in the sense that I get
burnt out on people; even online. Blame my Asperger and bipolar, but
I always feel I get lost in the shuffle and that is more habitual
thinking on my part, and I've been practicing self-affirmation, and
asserting oneself. I did a lot of that when I was in the homeless
shelter, but that's a whole other skill set, one in which you NEVER
back down, even if, as von Clausewitz stated, “war is (or becomes)
the continuation of politics”. Obviously, this is much different
and besides, I have always been comfortable being alone. But, too
much of it is not healthy; I don't want to end up like the weirdo
cat-lady.

At
any rate, I feel renewed and ready to join in the fun, conversation
and camaraderie with other writers, and especially my pals at #ROW80.
There's also #NaNoWriMo looming, and I have to figure out what in the
hell I'm going to write for this; I hope I'm not a one-trick pony.

Itinerant violist and computer trouble-shooter for more years than I care to admit. While no longer homeless, still crazy, but with Labels *sigh* a bus-riding Asperger, bipolar-ridden, PD or non-PD, carbon life-form, providing fodder for Medical community. Not even kidding. Still ridiculous.

Acquiring a much richer and fuller experience and finding deeper meaning in day to day life, than I ever learned in a classroom, concert hall, or computer center. I will never believe that things just occur randomly, just monumentally disordered.

Fish

Newegg.com Daily Deals

Try out the new Insticator!

Followers

Courtesy of @fastsatfinder or "Eye in the Sky"

Real-time Earth and Moon phase

World Map - Visitors

#IWSG 2016 - ALEX CAVANAUGH'S INSECURE WRITER'S GROUP

Total Pageviews

Eventually everything happens on Nebraska Avenue. The pimps have been here, both the real and the political. The athletes and the artists. It's a life, a state of mind and it's home, Nebraska Avenue, 33605, 33602 and 33604.

THE DELIBERATE GOALS OF VIOLA FURY

Working on a project involving many flags

I Haz Home Naow - in Kitty Heaven

My Rent-a-Kitty, has become a Perma-Kitty, Mama, although she passed away, nearly one year to the day that Jim died. She actually adopted Jim first, then me.